A reactive scheduling approach to combat remote interference in TDMA-based Wireless Mesh Networks

In the context of Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), distributed scheduling solutions, where nodes coordinate transmissions locally, are particularly appealing because they require less signaling overhead and are more reactive than centralized solutions. However, they are also more subject to interference from nodes that lie outside the local neighborhood where transmissions are scheduled. In this paper, we first provide numerical evidence that this phenomenon, which is often disregarded in the context of TDMA scheduling for WMNs, can severely affect the network performance. Secondly, we propose a distributed reactive approach to counterbalance the negative effects of interference, based on scheduling re-negotiation, and we compare the results obtained with different allocation algorithms through simulation.